What is Click Fraud and how to fight it successfully

What is Click Fraud:

Click fraud occurs when a person or a machine clicks on an advertising with the purpose of causing economic damage.

¿How click fraud cause this economic damage?

Much of the advertising that works today online, the advertiser must pay when his advertising is seen, or when a user clicks on the advertising. In the first case the advertiser would pay a price for, normally, 1000 impressions, being an impression each time a banner is loaded, although it is not seen by the user; and in the second case, the advertiser would pay for each time a user clicks on their advertising, this method being called pay per click, cost per click or CPC.

Therefore, if:

Our competitiors or other interested parties click on our ads in order to reduce our marketing budget, It’s click fraud.

Our competitiors or other parties click on our Ads in order to “burn” out marketing budget and disappear us from Google Ads, It’s click fraud.

If a webmaster click on the advertising that he has on his own website, It’s click fraud.

Types of Click Fraud:

Click Fraud to damage the competition:

Our competitors hires people or creates a click-bot to click on our advertising in Google Ads.

In this case Adwords Fraud, it usually happens in highly competitive sectors with very high CPCs, the click fraud between 24-hour locksmiths, plumbers, movers, funeral homes, technical services is especially known. The Click Fraud in these sectors is huge because the companies in these sectors advertising their services in Google Ads could be paying more than € 10 for a click. If these companies received only 30 fraudulent clicks they would be burning € 300 each day, or € 9,000 per month.

In these sectors click fraud strategies are very sophisticated to evade the Google Ads radar.

How to make click fraud and not be detected by Google Ads:

If you click several times from the same IP, without deleting cookies and from the same browser, any Click Fraud Detector will locate the offender.

If you click several times from the same IP, without deleting cookies and from different browsers, any Click Fraud Prevention Software will detect the offender.

If every time you click do not erase cookies, but you change IP, any Click Fraud Software of average quality, will detect the offender.

If every time you click delete cookies, you change IP, but everything you do from the same device, our system of click fraud prevention, will locate the fraud.

In the case of Adinton Click Fraud Software, our system detects both IP, cookies, device, geolocation, temporary distance between clicks, if there have conversions, page views. Analyze hundreds of variables in real time to detect fraud.

But it goes even further, because if a user blocks an IP, all our customers will see that IP “in Quarantine”, so we favor our work collaboratively to fight together against the click fraud.

Micro Click Fraud:

It is the other option. It is the most widespread, the most dangerous, which consumes a lot of money from advertisers and the most difficult to detect.

The Micro Click Fraud is made by small webmasters, who do not want to hurt the advertiser, they only want to earn a few euros per day. Therefore, every day they enter from different IPs, in hidden mode and click on Adsense, Criteo, … or any platform that works with small webmasters.

The complicated thing about this click fraud system is that do it from IPs, normally from large operators. Therefore, it would be a disproportionate risk to block the IP of Movistar, AT&T, Vodafone, Orange. ¿How work on these situations?. In this case is being sent a report to the platform with which we work, showing the fraudulent browsing and economically claiming those clicks, but DO NOT block this IP.

This type of click fraud does a lot of damage, because individually they are micro click fraud that do not harm the advertiser, but if we add all the fraudulent clicks that all webmasters do, for the number of months, a year corresponds a huge hole in our account and a higher CPA than it really should be..

In situations like this we recommend work with our anti-click fraud tool to be safe and quiet.